Every time I hear about Gaussian splatting, I think about triangle splatting[0] - GPUs were built to render triangles, so I wonder what games would be like if we supported generating and rendering them as much as we do Gaussian splats.
The Dreams game engine (only for PS4) does this and is able to achieve scenes that no other game engine can. Here's a technical talk about how they did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
Actually sorry not sure if they use triangle splatting, but gaussian splats at least.
The Sony Dreams beta in 2018, was truly revolutionary and even today the world hasn't caught up with a lot of its breakthroughs. I'd been deeply involved in the design of high-end, pro digital media authoring tools for two decades and when I saw that beta it blew my fucking mind.
Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet) spent over 8 years creating Dreams, which would never have happened without Sony's funding, but the tragedy was forcing what could have been a brilliant high-end authoring tool into a gamepad / lean-back interface. Even now, there are still innovative UX approaches in Dreams that could be adapted into high-end 2D, 3D, compositing and animation tools like Blender.
If I recall their talk correctly, models are unions of SDFs, which get sampled into a point cloud, and each point gets splatted as another SDF primitive called a "fleck".
I think that Gaussian splatting is generally better, as the Gaussians are smoother and easier to optimize, if you can use them.
Things like triangle splatting are useful if you have to integrate into an engine that only support triangles. But with modern graphics pipelines, you can implement Gaussians quite efficiently, including newer techniques like Gaussian point splatting that can scale up seamlessly to enormous scenes:
Bundle support in geometry nodes is huge for complex pipelines and workflows, particularly when combined with lists and closures. I have been running on the alpha builds to get access to them in my workflows.
It took me a while to properly understand it, but it's genuinely great. It maps so much more of what I expect from traditional coding, scripting etc into the visual paradigm and makes an awful lot easier to use.
Also, should out to databpy and nodebpy, both of which are indispensable and make using nodes and blender so much nicer:
Their LazyPosy channel has a video about how they made this one, difficulties, etc if you're interested in that too. More practical than technical, though it wasn't done with Blender.
You show something to your boss, he pats you on the shoulder and says "Perfect! Just move chairs 2 feet left and ship it". How does one do it with gaussian splats?
Apparently, while Gaussian splatting is not the core technique for all world models, it has become a dominant representation and rendering backend for spatial and reconstructive world models.
Pretty cool that Gaussian Splatting is included in Blender. It always amazes me how many (sometimes pretty hidden) features Blender provides while still being rather a lean piece of software.
I believe though that Gaussian Splatting is not ideal for getting well-structured mesh data with limited vertices for typical video game usage. I'm wondering where this is going in the future.
I've been using Claude to drive Blender with the official Blender MCP server. Mixed results; but some of them very good.
Claude Opus is very good at creating geometry nodes for specific applications. You have to know what to ask for. It's not a magic genie.
For example, I asked it to make a node setup to create the geometry for a table. It did a mediocre job of it. Then I told it to do research on the nomenclature for tables and create a parametric control interface to generate tables with the UI using the table nomenclature. It did a very good job of that. It set it up so that I could put the units in using Imperial or metric. I also asked it to come up with reasonable default values for the parameters and it did. With just a little tweaking I have a very useful table generator for greyboxing scenes.
I then did a similar round with it for book cases and straightback chairs with useful results.
I asked it to make material nodes for wood: oak, maple, etc. And it did a pretty good job of that. Nothing amazing, but a useful place to start.
It won't be replacing people that know what they are doing, but its useful for giving that person better specifications for what you want.
I had Claude keep notes on the project and it made a skill that has been useful for later projects.
Think of it as a very bright intern that works very fast but has very little practical experience.
The problem, of course, is that if AI replaces interns, then there may not be a future generation of experts. By then, though, the AIs may be good enough to replace the experts. Next year? Next week? Who knows. If you guide it right to learn as it works, it _does_ get better over time.
I have no idea what to expect or what the actual limits of this tech is. I've see it make really hilarious mistakes, then turn around and explain the math its using so well that I can ask for what I want "properly" and it's surprised that that was what I really wanted.
It is like dealing with a very well read alien.
If the AIs don't end up murdering us all in our sleep it could be an amazing world we are entering.
Fable 5.2 is really good at using Blender from my testing. That being said, even smaller models are good enough for junior level work, it just depends on what deliverable or metric you are looking at. Most agentic LLMs can now do low poly assets for example.
Blender can be guided with Opus 5.5 to do reasonably detailed buildings and generate textures, and modify existing models, say a car, and add doors. There is still a lot of handholding, but it's good enough!
We are converging on text specification to 3D world.
Gaussian Splat technology doesn't get as much hype as it deserves.
The killer app for VR headsets is still to come.
[0] https://trianglesplatting.github.io/
Actually sorry not sure if they use triangle splatting, but gaussian splats at least.
Media Molecule (LittleBigPlanet) spent over 8 years creating Dreams, which would never have happened without Sony's funding, but the tragedy was forcing what could have been a brilliant high-end authoring tool into a gamepad / lean-back interface. Even now, there are still innovative UX approaches in Dreams that could be adapted into high-end 2D, 3D, compositing and animation tools like Blender.
Things like triangle splatting are useful if you have to integrate into an engine that only support triangles. But with modern graphics pipelines, you can implement Gaussians quite efficiently, including newer techniques like Gaussian point splatting that can scale up seamlessly to enormous scenes:
* Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AWv_nIfp-U
* Paper: https://jorisar.nl/gaussian_point_splatting/gaussian_point_s...
* Repo: https://github.com/JorisAR/gaussian-point-splatting
It took me a while to properly understand it, but it's genuinely great. It maps so much more of what I expect from traditional coding, scripting etc into the visual paradigm and makes an awful lot easier to use.
Also, should out to databpy and nodebpy, both of which are indispensable and make using nodes and blender so much nicer:
https://github.com/BradyAJohnston/databpy https://github.com/BradyAJohnston/nodebpy
They have easy subscription options, even a monthly coffee adds up! Thanks!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670024
Their LazyPosy channel has a video about how they made this one, difficulties, etc if you're interested in that too. More practical than technical, though it wasn't done with Blender.
Thanks!
Claude Opus is very good at creating geometry nodes for specific applications. You have to know what to ask for. It's not a magic genie.
For example, I asked it to make a node setup to create the geometry for a table. It did a mediocre job of it. Then I told it to do research on the nomenclature for tables and create a parametric control interface to generate tables with the UI using the table nomenclature. It did a very good job of that. It set it up so that I could put the units in using Imperial or metric. I also asked it to come up with reasonable default values for the parameters and it did. With just a little tweaking I have a very useful table generator for greyboxing scenes.
I then did a similar round with it for book cases and straightback chairs with useful results.
I asked it to make material nodes for wood: oak, maple, etc. And it did a pretty good job of that. Nothing amazing, but a useful place to start.
It won't be replacing people that know what they are doing, but its useful for giving that person better specifications for what you want.
I had Claude keep notes on the project and it made a skill that has been useful for later projects.
Think of it as a very bright intern that works very fast but has very little practical experience.
The problem, of course, is that if AI replaces interns, then there may not be a future generation of experts. By then, though, the AIs may be good enough to replace the experts. Next year? Next week? Who knows. If you guide it right to learn as it works, it _does_ get better over time.
I have no idea what to expect or what the actual limits of this tech is. I've see it make really hilarious mistakes, then turn around and explain the math its using so well that I can ask for what I want "properly" and it's surprised that that was what I really wanted.
It is like dealing with a very well read alien.
If the AIs don't end up murdering us all in our sleep it could be an amazing world we are entering.
https://threejseval.com/
Though with some graphic design tools you have to proxy it with AppleScript because there is no other automatable interface with the design tool.